The Silver Spoon (14 page)

“I don't want to play with you any more,” she said, still covering her face. And without listening to my profuse apologies, she went away.

Left alone, I could think of nothing but to pick up her
o-tedama
and take them home. But then this very act became a seed of worry. What would I do if O-Kei-chan became exasperated enough to say I took them? Should I quietly take them back and leave them where they were? Or should I take them to school and put them in her desk? Such scheming and plotting came and went, worried as I was that I had in my drawer someone else's possessions. Thus passed an uneasy night.

The next morning, half afraid of seeing her and half worried about not seeing her, I went to school before everyone else and, sitting at my desk crestfallen, I thought about what had happened yesterday, and before then, and so on, as the classroom gradually filled up with pupils coming in ones and twos, and grew noisy. But O-Kei-chan didn't show up: Is she so angry she's decided to take the day off? Well, but I can't say that because it's not yet time for her to come. I was growing frustrated, when Choppei, one of the group who were pretty late, arrived and the time was finally almost up. No longer able to stop myself, I went to the gateway and peered out around the doors and at last, to my great relief—at least for now—saw her come down the slope holding her wrapped belongings. O-Kei-chan, unaware of anything, came through the gateway. I stepped out of the door casually, and we looked at each other. She put on a little embarrassed smile but without saying a word, went on in. So she's all right. She doesn't seem that angry.

O-Kei-chan spent that whole frustrating day playing lustily with her friends. Back home at my desk I was wondering if I should or should not go out into the backyard, when the latticed-door at the foyer quietly opened and a small voice said, “May I come in?”

I jumped up and out and from behind the partition said, “O-Kei-chan!” and stood on the step-up space.
¹³⁶
Perhaps because this was her first visit, she looked a little shy, but she flashed such a radiant smile nonetheless that the burden I'd been carrying was lifted at once. I invited this rare guest into my study, which was right by the side of the foyer.

O-Kei-chan was restless for a while, looking around the room, leaning on the elbow-high window to gaze at the stone lantern in the “light-stick azalea”
¹³⁷
shrubs, but when she had calmed down a bit, she placed both hands on the tatami and apologized with evident regret: “I am sorry I behaved so poorly yesterday.”

Faced with such an adult-like, formal apology I felt a little confused and as I thought about all the trouble she'd given me I even resented the fact that I had apologized to her myself. O-Kei-chan said that when she had gone home yesterday she was scolded. And she begged to have her
o-tedama
back. So after tantalizing her for quite a bit, I finally brought them out of the drawer for her. The
yūzen
silk crepe
¹³⁸
of the sacks originally came from a kimono for special occasions, she said, and you could see fragments of paulownia blossoms and phoenix wings on them. This was the story of the
o-tedama
that the two of us played with. As they flew up and down like butterflies, O-Kei-chan's face likewise nodded up and down, making the tufts of her hairpin dyed in red and white stripes flutter around her temples.

Trying not to drop the
o-tedama
from the back of her hand, O-Kei-chan kept pulling mean tricks.

With her slender fingers she formed a bridge on the tatami and let the
o-tedama
pass under it effortlessly. Her earlobes were beautiful, hot with excitement. The more exasperated the more stubborn she became and each time she made an error at a crucial point, she would throw the
o-tedama
at me or bite into my sleeve. Still, from then on she brought them to my house every day to play with me.

46

When we completed a reader our teacher would make us do “seize-and-read” on the pretext of review. The class was divided into boys and girls, and if someone in one group made a mistake in reading aloud, someone in the other group would quickly take over; this was continued until the book was finished, and the group with a greater number of pages read would be the winner. Boys were usually very boastful about various things, but when it came to competitive reading they became such weaklings and were always beaten. Also, when your turn came, you got nervous and stumbled, the turn seized.

AYATORI:
CAT'S CRADLE

On this occasion, chosen to start the reading, I was mindful of this and began to read very slowly. Seeing that I was unusually hesitant, everyone was sneering with contempt, but unfortunately for them I didn't make a single reading error, droning on and on in a most boring fashion. The passage where Prince Yamato Takeru sweeps down the grass sideways,
¹³⁹
the passage where there appear many horses and stories about a roan, a bay, and a dapple gray are told, the passage where a Negro crosses the desert on a camel, and so on and on—I kept reading one page after another, until I reached the chapter on the Mongolian invasion of Japan, which was near the end of the book. There was a picture of messily destroyed Chinese warships with Japanese skiffs rowing toward them, and on the night of the 30th of the intercalary Seventh Month, the writing said, a divine wind blew, reducing the 100,000-man strong military force to a mere three men.
¹⁴⁰

Sorely regretting that they'd been off guard, the girls would raise their hands even when I paused to take a breath, eager to take over. Amused by their bewilderment, I became even more composed and went on to the chapter called “Ceramics,” which, to my chagrin, made me falter. Because I wasn't much interested in ceramics manufacturing methods, I'd skipped that section in my routine reviews. I was readily taken over. Yielding my turn to the girls with great reluctance, I looked to see who my hateful enemy was and unexpectedly saw it was O-Kei-chan. I felt at once half happy and half resentful. It appeared she had been weeping out of exasperation, for her eyes were red at the rims. And though she rose to her feet holding her book, she sobbed so badly she couldn't read a single character. In a while the bell rang and the day ended with the boys' total victory, a rare event.

After school was over, when O-Kei-chan came to play with me as usual, her eyelids still looked a little swollen, and she was embarrassed.

“But I was truly bitter,” she said. She then took a plaited string out of her sleeve and said, “Let's play cat's cradle.” Above our little knees, touching as we knelt together, she draped the beautiful string around her pale wrists, and the string, taut between her slender, arched fingers, turned into many shapes.

“Water,” she said, transferring the string to me. I took it carefully.

“Lozenge.”

Manipulating her ten fingers through the string one by one, she made a koto. “Pluck, pluck, here's a koto.”

“Mr. Monkey.”

“Hand-drum.”

As if our mutual friendship were woven on our fingers and transferred back and forth, we would spend days intimately playing in this way.

SHŌ,
TSUZUMI: MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

47

One day, during the hour on ethics, our teacher said, “Today instead of me telling you stories, each of you will tell us a story.”

Pulling up his chair to the brazier and warming his hands over it, he called on some of the more brash or humorous ones to tell stories. Even someone who normally serves excellently as the general of brats on one side or loves to be a comic figure tends to stiffen or become tongue-tied when standing on the platform, with his face exposed to stares from all directions.

The first to be called on was a tall, skinny boy named Tokoro who always served as a “horse.”
¹⁴¹

“I'll tell a story about socks, sir,” he said, his knees trembling.

“A story about socks? Sounds very interesting,” the teacher said encouragingly.

“One sock floated by from over there,” Tokoro stammered, “another floated on from over here, and when they bumped into each other in the middle, they cried out, ‘Sock it to me!'” Thereupon he stepped down in a hurry.

The next one was Yoshizawa, a totally honest fellow whose lower front teeth almost covered his upper front teeth. Giggling for no reason, he said, “I'll tell a story about spears.”

“This time a story about spears. Sounds interesting, too,” the teacher said.

“One spear floated by from over there, another floated by from over here, and when they clattered into each other in the middle, they cried out, ‘Spare me, sir!'” Yoshizawa said, and stepped down.

All such convenient stories were being exhausted and I was inwardly cringing when, unluckily, my name was called at the very end. I knew any number of stories because of my aunt, but I couldn't think of a single one that was short and easy to tell. In the end I told a story “about a
kappa
whose plate dried up.”
¹⁴²
Once I started on it I gained courage and, glancing in O-Kei-chan's direction from time to time, I finished my story, though in a somewhat halting way. As I bowed to the teacher before returning to my seat, he smiled and gave me a light rap on the head.

“I didn't expect you to be so cheeky.”

Now it was the girls' turn, but none of them was willing to step forward, clinging as they did to their desks. So the teacher decided to name them in the order of seating, beginning with the first. Still, no one was willing, some even bursting into tears. Finally he came to the fifth seat, O-Kei-chan, who had evidently made up her mind and obediently stepped up on the platform. Even so, understandably, she was blushing to the nape of her neck and kept looking down.

After a while, though, moving her hands as if she were swimming in a dream, she began to speak, pausing with each phrase. Overcome with anxiety and sympathy, I was so agitated I could barely look her in the face. Nevertheless, as her story progressed her large, clear eyes became steady and alert, her posture adult-like and sharp, and in her incomparably limpid voice she went on telling a story briskly, neatly—the story about the Hatsune Drum,
¹⁴³
one that I had told her. Enchanted by the unexpected poise of the narrator and drawn by the strange, fascinating story, the pupils became unusually quiet.

When her story was finished, the teacher said, “Today all the boys told stories well, while it was expected that none of the girls would come out, so they were supposed to lose, but with Kei-san's
¹⁴⁴
single story just now, they won. I was impressed.”

The girls broke into smiles. O-Kei-chan blushed and walked back to her seat, eyes modestly lowered. I watched her with a strange feeling, half happy, half jealous. I hadn't intended
her
to tell that story.

48

Games on winter nights are deeply felt and enjoyable. O-Kei-chan would arrive, hands frozen, and, upon coming into the room, cling to the brazier. For this lovely guest my aunt made a large charcoal fire every night. Her shoulders hunched from the cold, she would remain almost bent over the brazier for a while. Waiting impatiently, I would tug at her bangs or poke my fingers in the rings of her
ochigo
-style hair.
¹⁴⁵
She, being as temperamental as I was, would at times overreact and start crying. When she did I would immediately surrender without a moment's hesitation and apologize unconditionally. Sometimes I would put my mouth close to her ear as she lay face down on the floor and repeat, “Forgive me, forgive me,” but she would continue shaking her head. After crying a while, though, she would abruptly change her mood and say, “That's enough,” and give me a reproachful, forlorn smile. At such times I might wipe the tears off her slightly flushed eyelids.